Lab 2 - Advanced Data Visualization
Part One: Identifying Bad Visualizations
I believe that this graph is showing that different countries have different proportions of individuals who believe that vaccines are safe. While most of the region medians fall around 85, the median percentage is considerably lower for Europe and the Former Soviet Union.
We have region, country, and percentage of country that believes vaccines are safe.
x-axis: percentage of people who believe vaccines are safe, color: global region, “y-axis:” region (to produce the stacking).
Geom_point; a dotplot
The points are trending upwards for seemingly no reason, which is misleading. I would do a boxplot or a density plot in order to better convey the message of the distributions within the regions.
If we’re trying to look at general trends between regions, it doesn’t make sense to label individual countries. I will remove these.
There is no reason to re-label the regions. I will remove the legend.
Part Two: Broad Visualization Improvement
Chart 3.3: Map of countries according to levels of Trust in Scientists (pg. 55). Each country is supposed to display the amount of trust that a country has for scientists. It’s quite difficult to draw a lot of insights from this graph, but apparently we’re supposed to be able to recognize that countries with a lot of diversity tend to have a lot more trust in scientists.
Country, percentage of people who answered ‘high trust,’ percentage of ‘medium trust,’ and percentage of ‘low trust.’
Shape: country, color: trust percentage
This is a heatmap
Apparently, they displayed three different variables on the graph, the percentage of those that answered ‘high trust,’ ‘medium trust,’ and ‘low trust.’ However, I’m not quite sure how they managed to display this, as it’s on a sliding scale from low to high, rather than percentage. Based on their analysis, I have a feeling that they either just used the “high,” or just displayed the WGM_index. But, I will make this more clear.
The country colors all look very similar to each other. I believe I should make the colors for “low trust” and “high trust” more distinct.
I think I should have an option to hover over the country and have it display its trust level. It’s difficult identifying which one has the largest trust.